Sports of The Times; Of Owners, Coaches, Promise Keepers and Today's New Sports Order

By ROBERT LIPSYTE

Published: October 12, 1997

Some of the city's most fervent Yankee fans had mixed feelings last week when their season stopped dead. Up in the Bronx, where the pinstripes (actually chalk stripes, I've been told) are on sacred cloth, it was feared that the short-term joy of seeing the club win another pennant could come at the cost of eventually not seeing them in the borough at all. The momentum of another championship, went the paranoia, could grease the secret deal between George Steinbrenner and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani -- a Manhattan ball park with enough luxury boxes to make even the Fat Worm in the Big Apple happy at last.

But sniping at Steinbrenner, calling him names, has long lost its kick; he's still here, after all, blustering, bullying, holding the city hostage with the tired iconography of a team that no longer stands alone in SportsWorld as shorthand for excellence. In the New Sports Order, there are generations who worship the Cowboys, the Braves, the Bulls, Nike, who have their own owners to rival George. But last week's magic number -- the combination of a Yankee defeat and an Islander victory over the non-Steinbrenner, John Spano -- brought back into focus the basic problem of big-time sports: an owner can be cut for the good of the game only on financial grounds.

Spano pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud in Nassau County last Tuesday, admitting using false documents to make his net worth appear to be $230 million. It was part of a scheme that convinced the Fleet Bank of Boston, the Islanders owner John Pickett and Gary Bettman, commissioner of the ''Coolest Game on Earth,'' that he could afford to buy, improve and even get a better arena for the needy franchise. How could all those smart people get snookered? Was it because he looked so soft, so harmless?

Looking at Spano over tea the week before, I thought he seemed to be the flip side of the Steinbrenner-Marge Schott blowhard, more in the Bud Selig-Uriah Heep model of hangdog, sad-sack owner. All may be shameless manipulators who believe the end justifies the means. In his unpublished, litigated autobiography, the former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent has called Steinbrenner ''rotten to the core'' and Selig ''a small-town schlepper.''

Same thing? All of the owners (I forget Heep's story; it was early in my career) have daddy demons that drive them, and Spano, though less chesty than Steinbrenner, is also protective of his inflated youthful athletic achievements.

Meanwhile, up in the Bronx, Borough President Fernando Ferrer, recuperating from surgery and the loss to Cleveland, has been pushing a Pollyanna but not impossible plan to keep the Bombers near the street on which I was born. It would require extensive improvements, better traffic access, more parking, a Metro North station and renovations to the stadium, including 45 new luxury boxes. It would also, according to Ferrer's office, require some assurance that if Steinbrenner were given an extension of his Stadium lease beyond 2002, it wouldn't turn out to be a future ransom note. Ferrer thinks there is no real New Jersey deal and he calls the midtown stadium plan ''a billion-dollar boondoggle'' that will never happen.

But something is fishy. To pay off one of those Mayor-to-Mayor baseball bets, Giuliani pulled a 13-inch bass out of the East River to send to Cleveland. It was bad enough that the catch was a fraud -- an aide had bought the dead fish earlier and had it hooked up -- but Giuliani pulled it out while wearing a Yankee hat and jacket. Decode that.

It might also be worth decoding the coincidence last week of the flipside coaches. Dean Smith, conventionally accepted as a beau ideal of college mentors, announced his retirement soon after Bill McCartney announced his ascendancy. While coaching football at Colorado, McCartney was father figure to dozens of student-athlete bad boys; there were sexual assaults, street crimes, academic frauds on his watch. But he made a major comeback last weekend in Washington as founder/coach of the Promise Keepers, hundreds of thousands of evangelical Christian men who hug and pat each other, cry a lot, and swear to keep women out of the huddle and away from the remote controls. It sounds an awful lot like football.

I'd become a Promise Keeper myself if McCartney dropped the gender war and started a class war. After all, coaches are basically the owners' foremen.

Imagine McCartney sending Joe Torre to say to Steinbrenner more or less what husbands are supposed to say to their wives this season: ''Boss, I've made a terrible mistake. I've given you my role. I gave up leading this team and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role. There can be no compromise here. Go back to Tampa and go down with the ships.''

Fantasy? Maybe you'll believe it when you hear about it on Marv Albert's new radio show on WFAN.

Photo: John Spano, left, seemed to be the flip side of George Steinbrenner as owner, but both are protective of inflated youthful athletic achievments. (Associated Press; Vic DeLucia/The New York Times)